Background
Before the album's release, it appeared as if the band was on the verge of commercial rebirth. Tom Bailey and engineer Keith Fernley had been experimenting with making dance music under the moniker "Feedback Max." As such, the group slipped several white-label 12-inch singles to London disc jockeys, the most successful of which was a track called "Come Inside". The rave-style record became massively popular, and charted high on the playlists of influential DJs. Most of the Feedback Max records, including "Come Inside", were actually remixes of tracks that had been intended for the next Thompson Twins album. When "Come Inside" was issued as an official Thompson Twins release, the record was immediately ignored, as it stalled at number 56 on the UK Top 75 chart. Consequently, the British release of Queer was cancelled.
The album was released in the United States and Germany in September 1991. Warner Bros. tried a similar marketing approach in the US: Pre-release radio singles were shipped to station programmers in a paper zip-apart sleeve that said simply "Come Inside." A question mark appeared in place of the artist's name. The official single was released, but it was only successful on the Billboard dance charts. This modest success prompted Warner Bros. to issue a second single, "Groove On", despite the fact that remixes already existed for another album track, "Flower Girl". The former failed to make an impact. However, in the UK, "The Saint" was released as the second single from the album; it reached number 53.
In 1992, the Thompson Twins appeared on the soundtrack of the Ralph Bakshi film Cool World with a mostly-instrumental piece titled "Play With Me"; it was actually a remix of the song "Strange Jane" from Queer. Warner Bros. then released the track as an official Thompson Twins single, now called "Play With Me (Jane)", but the Cool World version of the song wasn't released as a single, even on the maxi-single format. Although "Play With Me (Jane)" did not make the UK Top 75, as with the other UK releases, it was a modest hit on the UK Dance Chart, reaching number 15.
Following the release of Queer, the band dropped the name Thompson Twins altogether and moved deeper into electronica with a new group called Babble, published by Warner Bros.' sister label Reprise. The group released two subsequent albums: The Stone and Ether.
Read more about this topic: Queer (Thompson Twins Album)
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